Coming up the week after next I will get back to working on The Relentless. The next sequence takes place on the island, which is a privately owned island used as part of a weapons smuggling operation. The idea was one of the earliest for the story, beginning with having Wal get his hand chopped off in a humorous sequence. Making that funny should be fun as it is also quite dark.
I needed a facility for the hand chopping sequence, so I set it on a remote island. Once I had the island concept I started thinking about other things that could happen on the island. I had to get them their, and that led to creating the character of Captain Lia Purdie who becomes their regular pilot. I wanted an exciting way to physically get onto the island, so that led to the freefall drop for Barry and the wingsuit sequence with Maggie and Grace.
I had come up with two sequences for Grace, and once I fleshed out what would happen on the island I realized those could take place there. Here Grace uses James Bond to talk down a nervous security guard, and she encounters a younger version of General Williams which provides a little more backstory about the two of them.
A lot happens on the island. After that is the tower sequence, after which the characters begin to figure out what is actually going on, and the big finale in the evil villain’s lair. I am close enough to the finish line that I can see it quite clearly, and I am anxious to get back to work on it.
What’s Up with Us
I will finish the non-fiction book I have been focusing on next week, take a few days off for my birthday, and then back to working on The Relentless. The non-fiction book will come in at about 150,000 words, which is roughly 300 pages.
A lot has been going on. I had to deal with the death of my father and put in a lot of time helping my elderly mother. Belle has been getting a lot more shows as things get better Covid-wise, and I am helping her develop new material as she expands into new markets. She is finally starting to get some traction breaking into the wedding market.
We made a lot of progress on building the workshop. It has C&C, laser cutting, 3D printing, and tons of tools, many of which came from my father’s workshop, and some of those came from my grandfather’s fix-it shop. In terms of hardware, we are now better supplied than some hardware stores.
Our first major project with the workshop is redoing our green screen studio. By making a few adjustments we can make it a little bigger. We are building a new flatter support for the green screen, and building a cabinet and setting up a monitor for a teleprompter and another monitor so she can see what she is doing.
Speaking of monitors, I am trying to figure out the best 4K monitor to go with my new AMD based Ryzen 7 5700G with a Geforce RTX 3060 graphics card. Not the top of the line I had hoped for, but still many many times more powerful than my older system. It was quite challenging to get and I had to jump through a few hoops but it is now actually on my desk.
The second studio we are setting up is one for motion capture. We will be able to do face, hands and full body. With the power of real-time ray-tracing, I will be able to do live puppeteering of 3D characters, which will get me back to doing some type of performing, which I really miss but my condition makes difficult.